A New Direction

An annual review in austere times

In the lead up to the Arts Council funding and cuts announcements in April 2011, A New Direction needed an annual review that reflected the austere times.

Therefore, the design that we created, needed to be cost effective and modest, however it was important we did not compromise the positive and dynamic identity and core brand values.

With this in mind, we appropriately created a simple small, compact A5 booklet that was rich content and positive in feel. We deliberately scaled back use of of photography and created bold graphic shapes to house pull quotes and key information.

BigLop Festival

The Biggest Learning Opportunity or ‘BigLop’, was a year long programme run by A New Direction that brought together 14 leading creative and cultural educational partner organisations with 150 London schools across each of the London boroughs. The programme culminated in ‘BigLopFest’ – a celebratory week of activities at three venues across central London for children, young people, their teachers and families.

We were asked to design the festival guide for BigLopFest, which also needed to showcase the programme outcomes and provide legacy learning tools for teachers, parents and students.

Building on the theme of ‘bringing back to the streets’, we used an interesting map fold to house detailed festival listings on one side of the guide, and created a large illustrated street map of London on the back. Here the learning tools, interesting facts and activities for young Londoners to explore were housed within the illustration.

Discover Explore Choose

We designed and wrote the 2010/11 brochure for A New Direction, the London delivery organisation for Creative Partnerships.

The brief was to compile a simple-to-follow and easy-to-read document to help teachers understand all the different ways A New Direction can work with them. They offer a broad range of learning opportunities with creative partners to London’s children and young people – including their flagship enquiry school programmes, the Arts Award and their alumni network.

The brochure asks teachers and head teachers to take just a few minutes of time to discover, explore and choose A New Direction. We designed a vibrant colour coded tabular system to divide the sections and invite readers to explore further. We condensed and organised information from numerous internal sources into relevant sections and rewrote the copy using a consistent tone of voice to create this teacher-focused and benefit-led brochure.

It also featured a pullout booklet detailing the enquiry school programmes offered by the 14 creative partners working with A New Direction. The quality and length of the programme summaries varied considerably. So we reduced each one to fit a page, rewrote them in a consistent style, removed jargon and highlighted key points of interest to help teachers decide which programme would be best suited to their young people.

Case studies

A series of case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of the London Creative Partnerships activity, including methodologies, sharing experiences, providing evidence of results and cataloguing essential learning outcomes.

InLondon identity

Inlondon is A New Direction’s interactive network and events programme designed for London schools interested in extending their creative teaching and learning practice. We designed the identity to sit as a sister marque to the A New Direction brand focusing on bringing people together.

Annual Review

To emphasise A New Direction’s geographic focus we developed a series of street images as section breaks throughout the document to add an element of wit while conveying a very real sense of London.

A new identity

A New Direction is an independent charity working with London schools and young people. Their work is driven by young Londoners to help them navigate London’s cultural opportunities and find new and fulfilling ways of being creative.

Working with key stakeholders, we facilitated a series of workshops to devise a name, identity and marketing collateral for the organisation.